I would be very concerned if an RNG simply produced a natural 0.

I would be very concerned if an RNG simply produced a natural 1.

I would be very concerned if an RNG simply produced a natural 0xf379aa46d1086bca.

I would be very concerned if an RNG simply produced a natural 2.

Why would that be any more concerning than the RNG producing any other number?

peace only achieved when there is infinite punishment delivered to the foul and wicked.

This is not true.

I guess it depends on the implementations.

When I use the Atlassian CLI vs their MCP server, I tend to see something like half the token burn with the CLI with more accurate results.

That could be an Atlassian issue but that's the results I'm seeing.

yeah MCP contains a provision for some blocktext for instructions. If your MCP has walls of text in those instructions, it will burn more tokens that a terse MCP.

How do you think the LLM becomes aware of which mcps are available? Vibes?

It depends on the harness. But most use a tool_search tool.

yes and using that tool does what with tokens?

You seem confused.

I'm not. You can build an MCP and throw a ton of junk in there and bloat the shit out of its token cost. So, really, "it depends".

The simplified interactions are how it should have been designed in the first place.

It's difficult to come up with the optimal workflow on the first try. So an API should typically start out flexible even at the expense of complexity, in order to enable experimentation, and then you can optimize to make the common case simple, once you know what the common case is.

Sure but that common case should go into the core APIs, not an MCP.

agreed lots of ppl writing mcp as a lipstick on the pig.

MCP is exactly the lipstick we needed to put on our pigs, APIs that is not ours, but open source tools we use internally and also wanted to expose to our agents.

Yea my company is willing to pour money into an MCP but has concretely resisted attempts to improve or care about the API for years.

Banks for what?

Uber can be done totally headless, without a screen?

Food? Get outta here.

Maybe wise ones will return to paper.

that would be the pendulum swinging too far back

Exactly. In fact, hiring may be conducted almost entirely based on what kind of tools and skills you build that no one else really has access to.

Good way to be banned

How would they know? Only if you use a coding harness, but one could write their own harness with less obvious system prompts.

I’m not encouraging one do this. I mostly route between the free models on OpenRouter and OpenCode free models, and I mostly write simple apps where I can casually oversee even a small model and get awesome results.

But if you are out there spending 200 dollars a month, consider a few hacks, because that’s just overpriced. We are developers after all, they aren’t supposed to be able to trick us :)

Edit:

Piracy, with the above , would look like a universal server that routes between all provider UIs. That means the end user doesn’t even give a shit which provider it goes to, serious token usage, serious theft.

Someone could make this , I suppose. In a way, commodification is a clean solution to the inevitable theft. It’s better it just be so darn cheap and ubiquitous.

isn't that what they did to opencode? when they were using the subs by reverse engineering their APIs

Because they are anti-intellectuals. They do not want people to hold influence by having massive intelligence.